Page 130 of Pareidolia

Lust.

CHAPTER 12

ASPEN

This is the monster I’d always imagined when I heard the tales of the thing that lived in the forest. Until now, Nox had been eloquent, close to human. He’d been maliciously charming, dangerous, but this…

The red glow of his eyes shines like a halo, and his sharp teeth seem to have multiplied, filling his mouth like a row of razors.

“Left,” he snarls. It’s the same strange echo as before when he’d said I was broken, but this time his wings don’t flutter. They don’t hum. He just snaps out the word again. “Left. Left, left.”

I’ve spent the past two days trying to convince myself that I was going crazy, trying to convince myself that maybe Nox was more like me than the monster I’d heard about… but no.

He is a monster, through and through. Something more, something far more dangerous than the stories I’ve been told.

Something that humans could only scratch the surface of.

As he moves toward me, I can see it in his eyes.

I’m not safe.

I’m not going to make it out of this alive unless I do something—something—to change the expression on his face, to divert the obvious intention of the tendril wrapped around my throat.

I swallow, and the sensation of the pressure around my neck makes me shiver in a way that has nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the memory of how that shadow felt wrapped around my dick earlier.

This is exactly why I was trying to leave, exactly what I was trying to avoid. There’s something about Nox, about the danger.

Even now, when I can see it on his face—when I can tell that he wants to tear me apart by the flare of his wings fanning angrily and the flash of sharp teeth…

I want it.

I want to see what kind of monster he is.

I think I’d let him rip me to shreds if he promised to feed me more emotions while he did it.

And…

Fuck.

I don’t want to die.

“Come on, big guy.” It’s hard to speak through the clench around my throat, but I manage in strangled little gasps that make his eyes flare brighter. “Aren’t you tired of fear?”

The tendril loosens, but only slightly. Nox growls, tangling my hair in one hand while two others wrap around my waist, dragging me into the air until I’m dangling a foot off the ground and I’m level with his gaze.

“Fear…” He echoes the word, and then trails that long, dark tongue from between his sharp teeth to lick along the side of my face in a slow, steady line. “But not you.”

“No,” I groan, dragging one hand up along his chest. “But I can feed you something else.”

Those red eyes flash, dark pupils blowing wide until the black consumes them. “Lust,” he rumbles, and I nod.

“That’s right. Do you want to fuck me, Nox?”

It’s either get fucked or be very, very fucked. And I’m not liar enough to deny the fact that I’d rather take monster dick than die by monster hands.

His low, rumbling fuck is enough to tell me I made the right choice… though a part of me knows this wouldn’t work if I didn’t want it.

Nox can taste emotions.